Soo, here goes once more. And if you were wondering if Knock Out and Arcee were still digging, I assure you they are.
KO - WHAT?! You Promised that we would get out!
Turbo - I do not remember promising that
Arcee holds up a pickaxe to KO - I do not see what You are so upset about, I am doing all the digging anyway...
KO - That would have been unnecessary if Turbo just teleported me, I mean us out of there.
Starscream - Who will repair my broken arm?
Soundwave - [...]
Turbo - Yeah Soundwave, you tell Them!
Arcee set to the gruelling task of inspecting yet another cavern. It was boring, dull and seemed to always end in more trouble than it was worth. On a more personal level a seam on one of her freshly patched blasters was dangerously close to opening again but she was amazed how she had not sustained more damage during the skirmish. If anything now she had a battle scar of her own to brag about to Bulkhead and Miko, that is, if it ever came to that. She liked playing it off cool for the most part.
Something moved in her peripheral vision and she whipped around, blasters at the ready to realize it had been just a shifting shadow. They did not have as many light sources now. One of Knockouts headlights had been damaged during the fight and she was concerned with sparing her remaining energon, thus her headlights were dimmer than she would have usually preferred -"Anything?" She called out, being unnerved by the echo of her own voice.
Knockout made a non-descript sound while he scanned the walls in search of any structural inconsistencies, putting his bets on Arcee's firepower. However, if he had to be perfectly honest he had another agenda in mind. From their conversations he gathered that the autobot assumed he was on the energon scouting mission, in an abandoned mine, a mine abandoned by decepticons… who were notorious for strip—mining energon until there was nothing left. The logic of Arcee's assumption evaded him but it worked in his favor so why prove the Autobot otherwise? Especially if his assignment was of a far more personal nature? Hidden from Arcee another signal was showing on his internal screen and he felt he was getting closer to the source. -"If I could get to the Autobot frequency do you think they would rescue us?" He started casually poking the ground of the cavern floor with his prod.
-"If you mean to ask if they would rescue You alongside with me then Yes, but they would not be happy about it." Disclosing their coded comm line to a Decepticon was very risky and she would do it probably as her last resort – they were not there yet. "However who is to say that you will not share it with your friends on Nemesis?"
Knock Out shrugged - "I do not have an obligation to keep it secret but you can still ask."
-"Would you do it if I asked?"
Knockout made an amused sort of snort but did not give any other answer.
Arcee was irked, she turned around to snap at him only to notice that Knock Out was gone and currently there was a hole in the ground where he used to stand.
-"By the Allspark, the Earth swallowed him whole." She muttered. -"Knockout?!" She yelled into the hole.
This time Knock Out was certain he was on the right track. He had prodded the substrate at the point it had been the weakest but he had not expected for it to give out under him.
He kicked the most offending pieces of stone from his joints and quickly scanned the new area, instead of a cavern this one was a crevice the ceiling of which disappeared high above him. He ploughed through the narrow passage ignoring the sting of scratches on his finish, stepping into some sort of liquid – water. He tentatively tried the water and realized that it was not too deep. He took out his energon prod to help him find a more stable path and made his way across the dark creek towards the lights at the back.
He ignored the eerie green glow emanating from the dots on the ceiling and focused on the faintly glowing container which was now in his sight. Carefully he scanned the container again to be sure. Once he was satisfied with the reading he could start fretting, it was by sheer luck it had prevailed so long in the state it was in. It might have been a trick of light but he could have sworn it brightened slightly when he touched it. -"Got you." He placed the object into his innermost compartment which he had pre-emptively filled with a mix of energon and nourishing fluid used for storing protoforms. He heard Arcees' voice from somewhere behind. She sounded concerned. Good.
Moments passed and Arcee became more unnerved. She was not sure why she felt that way, probably because the medic was an asset to her. -"Arcee!?" She heard the muffled voice from the hole.
-"You online?" She yelled back, internally scoffing for the stupid question, of course he was.
-"Barely, but you should see this."
-"How deep is it?
-"It is a slide but I will catch you!" Not quite trusting the red medic she put her blasters on the ready in case it was a trap and jumped into the hole. It felt like she was ground through rocks and gravel until she emerged through the other side and landed into the expectant arms of Knockout.
-" I wish all autobots were this easy to..mmph."
-"Don't." Arcee had put a hand on his mouth to stop whatever it was that he was about to say and disentangled herself from his hands, shaking any loose gravel out of her joints. She looked around and saw what seemed to be an underground water vein. The ceiling of it stretched above them, covered in green glow worms [1] which reflected in the still water.
It was beautiful, they looked at the illuminated ceiling for a while.
-"It's just like Cybertron at night." Knockout whispered, feeling a pang of homesickness.
-"Do you think you can fix my com. link?" Arcee interrupted suddenly.
Knock Out was so affronted by the sudden change of pace he failed to produce an answer.
-"Can you?"
-"I will have to induce stasis, and I do not have proper tools to do that unless you prefer doing it the old-fashioned way." He was referring to administering a hard blow to the head which effectively put the patients in stasis and occasionally permanently offlined them. "And rummaging through your cerebral circuits in these conditions – almost no light to speak of and all this organic muck - may cause irreversible damage to your cognitive processing." Knockout finished and looked at Arcee's cool expression.
-"So it is a 'No' in short." She felt amused by imagining him saying that in Ratchet's voice because that would have probably been the same line.
-"I have no qualms about cracking open your cerebral helm but I felt it was necessary to explain the likely side-effects associated with it. So in short, that is up to you." Knock Out explained with a tinge of mirth in his voice. "Just tell me when you want to start."
And the insane mech she expected him to be was back. Arcee felt relieved.
-"Then how about you send a distress signal through your com? We do pick up on those unlike Deepticons."
-"I suppose, but I need a certain..." He rubbed his index and thumb finger together while he was mulling over how to put it best. "insurance that you will not blast me to pieces once the ground bridge opens."
-"You have my word."
Knockout rose an optic ridge, that was all he could hope for, but if anything, Autobots were less likely to go back on their word than Decepticons. -"If I am to contact Autobots through the common line we will be spotted by Soundwave. Let me make this clear we, scratch that, I do not want to be spotted by him."
-"Can you send a text message through human channels?"
-"What are the numeric credentials?"
-"4965286"
Knockout kept still with optics narrowed and optic ridges furrowed in concentration while transfiguring deception code into something remotely familiar to human interfaces. This made him deal with binary system which he was not a fan of. [2] It was sooo slow. Soundwave did a much cleaner job of this.
-"All ok?" Arcee hovered near him.
-"Which message do you want to transmit?"
Jack was at work when he received an odd message from an unknown number. - Arrzee trapped. Ab. Nomencl. Q T35: 39.5296° N, 119.8138° W; ST- 50m. Send g-bridge. Knockout. [3]
He rushed to check if the midnight-blue motorbike was parked in her usual place behind the drive-through but it was empty. His shift was ending in 10 minutes but he called Miko to ask if anyone at the base had seen Arcee.
As he had anticipated Miko was hanging out at the Autobot base together with Bulkhead and they had been a little worried about the Arcee as well. Appears that she had been missing for a while and had not been responding to their attempts to contact her. When he forwarded the message to other Autobots their conclusion was that Knock Out had kidnapped Arcee and held her hostage.
-"Not our Arcee?!" Smokeskreen looked disturbed as if part of his perfect world had crumbled. Knock Out was not known to be the strongest or most intimidating mech on the field, it made no sense.
-"He probably did some sort of weird medic mumbo jumbo stuff." Miko interjected which caused a scoff from Ratchet who intoned that whatever Knock Out did was Not what was considered acceptable by any medic standards.
-"What does he want?" Wheeljack butted in.
-"Did he ask for a medical kit? This is how we interact with Starscream." Bumblebee quipped.
-"No, no demands just coordinates for a ground bridge 50 meters under the surface quadrant T35?" Ratchet rumbled while putting in the coordinates to see where exactly that was. -"Aha, the old energon mine!"
-"But why would she sign it 'Knockout'?" Bulkhead had been twitching his leg nervously ever since they started the discussion.
-"It must be a decepticon trap of some sort." Wheeljack sneered.
-"OR they are on a date!" Miko chimed in, "Imagine a romance between star-crossed lovers of opposing factions, never allowed to show their emotions in front of their…Whoa!" Bulkhead lifted the little human before she could finish and before anyone at the meeting had to empty their tanks at the mental image.
-"Either way we have no other lead of finding her.' Optimus finished.
-"But we will be walking right into their trap Optimus!" Ratchet wrung his hands in frustration.
-"Then we will have to come prepared." And that was the end of discussion. They were not Decepticons, they could not afford losing teammates.
Arcee paced nervously while waiting for anything to happen. Knock Out poked at the glow-worms which were located at the lower part of the wall, they were disgusting and mushy but their bio-luminescence fascinated him.
Moments later one of the cave walls rippled as a tell-tale sign of ground bridge about to flash into existence. Knock Out got his prod out just in case, not like he could do much with it against bunch of armed Autobots but he at least had to try.
-"Stand down!" Arcee commanded, though she was not sure if it was to the Decepticon or to her team, as she saw the hulking outline of Optimus emerge from the portal followed by Smokescreen. The smaller bot zeroed in on Knock Out, rifles ready. The red medic lifted his hands tensely, hoping that he was not going to be losing any more parts that day.
-"Arcee, are you unhurt?"
The little mech nodded and quickly explained the general outlines of how she had become trapped and Knock Out's part in this incident. Through their conversation Smokescreen still held Knock Out at gun-point making the medic only slightly twitchy.
-"Lower your gun, Smokescreen." Optimus said politely, that did not sound like an order but the bot complied.
-"Knock Out, I am afraid you are to come with us for time being." The large mech actually sounded apologetic despite their reversed positions of power.
-"Ha, made You squirm." The rookie poked the medic in the chest plates and motioned him to follow them through the ground-bridge. Knockout looked nonplussed -"You know I could have made a choice in favor or rotary blade rather than phase shifter to search you for omega keys on that operating table." [4]
That made the rookie shut up for a while until he came up with a comeback -"I got you stuck in the wall."
Knock Out assessed if it was at all productive to start squabbling before he even exited the ground bridge and decided against it -"That you did."
Howling ghosts – they reappear
In mountains that are stacked with fear
But you're a king and I'm a lionheart.
A lionheart.
"Lionheart"[OMAM]
Boom-Chaka! No more caves... oh no, wait. Autobot base is technically a cave... nevermind.
A couple of notes:
If we are to go by the fact that Autobots deemed it safe to groundbridge Megatron himself to their jolly little base, then why not Knock Out?
[1] This is a nod to Waitomo Glowworm Caves in New Zealand. Google them, they are awesome.
[2] KO needs to deal with binary system which still is the most common form for human programming. I like to imagine that Cybertronians roll with quantum system. The basic difference is that binary has option of either 1 or 0 whilst quantum system has option of 1 or 0 OR both. You already knew that.
[3] I assumed that KO would probably send a message in his professional lingo and probably misspell Arcee's name in human language.
[4] This actually refers to the series content in TFP, I am currently too lazy to look up the name of the episodes or the seasons but you get the gist.